InformationWeek

Constellar Hub 3.5e, dubbed the E-series, contains some of the features that have become common in E-business-integration products from other vendors, including Active Software, CrossWorlds Software, and Extricity--namely, support for the Extensible Markup Language, the industry data format that's becoming common for business-to-business communications. The Constellar Hub also supports Internet application protocols and integration with E-mail.

But some customers aren't ready for external application integration yet. Calanais Ltd., the information systems arm of Glasgow, Scotland, utility ScottishPower, has been using Constellar for years to link mainframe systems with distributed networks running Unix or Windows NT. Calanais is less interested in the E-business features than it is in Constellar's support for IBM's MQSeries middleware, which will let the company move its application links from a batch-transfer mode to more real-time connections.

Still, says Stuart Roberts, Calanais' integration-services manager, it's good that Constellar is laying the groundwork for E-business integration now. "At least we have an option for a future move," he says.

Constellar Hub 3.5e also provides capabilities that other enterprise application-integration software vendors already offer. For instance, Constellar will add support for new enterprise application packages. The software had already supported Oracle applications; the new version will also include interfaces for apps from SAP, PeopleSoft, and Siebel Systems. Constellar Warehouse Integrator, part of the new package, will pull data from various data sources, transform and clean it, and load it into a data warehouse or a data mart.